A “BEACHCOMBER” IN MARSEILLES
It was well for my immediate peace of mind that no prophet accosted me
on my way down to the harbor next morning, to foretell the hungry days
that were to be my portion in Marseilles. One of the strikes that
periodically tie up the seaport of southern France was at its height.
Dozens of sailing vessels rode at anchor in the little “Old Harbor”; the
_râde_ behind the great V-shaped breakwater was crowded with shipping;
at the wharves were moored long rows of ocean-liners, among which the
white, clipper-built steamers of the Méssagéries Maritimes predominated,
their cargoes rotting in their holds. In a season of customary activity
it would have been easy to “sign on” some ship eastward bound. On this
November morning, a blind man must have known, from the silence of the
port, that there was small prospect even of finding work ashore.
Six sous rattled in my pocket. I squandered the half of them for a
breakfast and set out on a tour of the warehouses on the wharves. But at
every spot where twenty longshoremen were needed for the unloading of a
mail steamer, there were hundreds surging around the timekeeper,
clamoring for employment. I reached the front ranks of several of these
groups by football tactics, only to be informed, when I shouted my name
to the official on the top of a cask or bale, that he was hiring only
those stevedores whom he knew personally, and could not find places for
a fourth of them. As darkness came on, I gave over the useless tramping
up and down the roadstead, wolfed a “stevedore’s hand-out” in one of the
open-air booths of the Place de la Joliette, and utterly penniless at
last, turned away to the Asile de Nuit, as the only refuge left me.
The night asylum of Marseilles, situated beyond the Avenue de la
République, just off the silent wharves, was no such one-room hovel as
housed the wanderer in Cannes or Cuers. It covered what would have been
a block in an American city and rose to a height of three stories; a
plain, cold structure above the door of which the legend, “Asile de
Nuit,” cut in stone, seemed to suggest how permanent and irremediable is
poverty. Before the entrance were at least a hundred men of every age,
from mere boys to wrinkled greybeards, chattering in groups, leaning
against the building, seated on the sidewalk with their feet in the
gutter, or strolling anxiously up and down. Not all of them were
vagabonds in outward appearance. Here and there were men in
comparatively clean linen and otherwise as faultless in attire as
well-to-do merchants. A half-dozen of them wore dress-suits. _They_ did
not sit with their feet in the gutter; most of them held aloof from
their ragged companions and strutted back and forth with the pompous air
of successful politicians. But their conversation was, like that of the
others, of the “grafts” of the road throughout the continent of Europe.
The “dress-suit vagabond” was a type new to me then. He became a
familiar figure long before my wanderings ended. Wherever I met him, he
hailed from the Kaiser’s realm. The German is admitted by the vagabonds
of every nationality to be the most successful beggar in “the
profession.” It is this well-dressed tramp who awakens the blatant
sympathy of English and American tourists—those infallible judges of
human nature—the world over. “Poor fellow!” will cry the hysterical lady
abroad, when approached by one of this suave-mannered gentry; “He is,
indeed, making a struggle to keep up in the world! Let’s give him
something worth while, Arthur, for, surely, he cannot be ranked with
those lazy, ragged tramps over there.” As a matter of fact, “those
ragged tramps over there” are, more often than not, unpresumptuous
sailors reduced to tatters by the rascalities of shipping companies or
their able assistants, the land sharks of great ports. They would jump
at any chance of employment, while the “poor fellow,” who has begged the
very clothes that give him this false appearance of respectability, has
been approaching just such hysterical ladies for years, fully intends
doing so to the end of his days, and would not accept the presidency of
a railroad.
The Asile of Marseilles was not controlled, as those of other French
cities, by the gendarmerie, but was the branch establishment of a
neighboring monastery. By eight o’clock the crowd before the building
had doubled, the doors were thrown open, and we filed into an office
where three monks, in cowl and _soutane_, sat behind a wicket. In
Europe, man’s fate often hangs on a few scraps of paper. The applicant
for lodging in the Asile was irrevocably turned out into the night
unless he could show two of these all-important documents, one to
establish his identity and nationality, and another to prove that he had
been at work at a not-too-distant date. To forge certificates of
employment is no unsurmountable task to those who cannot come by them
honestly, and the most laudatory ones presented were those of the
“dress-suit tramps.” A grey-haired frère read my papers rapidly and
asked me, in English, with hardly a trace of foreign accent, if I spoke
French. Upon my affirmative reply he pushed the documents I had handed
him to his younger colleague, who entered my name and biography in a
huge book and gave me, with my papers, a check entitling me to a bed in
the Asile for eight nights.
I passed into the common room, a sort of chapel, the long benches of
which were already half-filled with grumbling tramps. In front was a
plain pulpit, around the walls fifteen large crucifixes, and at the back
a table where several men were writing letters with materials furnished
by the establishment. The room was crowded when nine o’clock sounded
from the great Asile bell. The outer door closed with a bang, the
grey-haired monk marched in with a gigantic Bible in his arms, mounted
the pulpit, and launched forth in a service worthy of note for the
length of its prayers and a drowsy discourse on the life of some saint
or other, to which the assembled vagabonds listened with stolid
tolerance as something which must be endured as a punishment for being
penniless. A gong rang out in the hall at the end of the sermon. We
mounted the stairs and each, according to his check, entered one of
several large rooms containing fifty beds apiece. Those who had
registered at some previous date went at once to their cots. The
newcomers filed by a frère in charge of a huge pile of bedding in the
center of the room. As each one received two clean sheets and a
pillow-case, he promptly sought out the cot assigned him, pulled off the
soiled linen, carried it back to the monk, and returned to make up his
bed. The cleanliness of the cots was truly monasterial. But they were so
narrow that to turn over was a precarious operation, and so much harder
than a plank bed as to suggest that they were filled with ground stone.
In spite, however, of the chorus of snores which mocked the printed
notices on the walls, commanding silence, I lay not long awake, for I
had long since parted company with soft beds.
At five in the morning, long before daylight, we were awakened by a
clanging bell and a trio of frères who marched up and down the room,
shouting to us to be up and away. Woe betide the man who turned over for
another nap, for one of the monks was upon him in an instant and, with
an agility and a force that suggested that he had been a champion
wrestler before taking orders, dumped him unceremoniously on the floor.
When we had made up our beds and soused our faces at a hydrant in the
outer courtyard, we were driven out into the dreary streets.
I had fallen in with a stranded English sailor at the Asile. Not even on
shipboard can one strike up acquaintances as quickly as in a band of
sans-sous. For an hour we wandered about the city, shivering in the
chill that precedes the dawn, and then made our way down to the harbor.
A British merchantman was discharging a cargo at one of the wharves. We
slunk on board and, keeping out of sight of the officers, dodged into
the forecastle. The crew was struggling to do away with a plentiful
breakfast.
“I sye, shipmites,” cried my companion, “any show for a bite?”
“Sure, lads!” shouted several of the sailors, with that hearty
unselfishness of the English seamen the world over. “Eat up and give the
old ship a good name!”
“English? Eh, lad?” asked the old tar who gave me his seat at the table.
“My mate is, but I’m an American,” I answered, a bit dubiously.
“Oh, hell,” rumbled the veteran salt, heaping his plate in front of me,
“English _or_ American! What’s the bloody difference? I mean you’re not
a dago or a Dutchman? How long have you been on the beach?”
We did full justice to the ship’s good name and left her with bread and
meat enough in our pockets to stave off the hunger engendered by a day
of tramping up and down the wharves. Next morning the only English
vessel in harbor lay well out in mid-stream, and we subsisted on
unroasted peanuts and broken cocoanut-meat imported for its oil, of
which several vessels from the Orient were discharging whole shiploads.
Penniless sailors swarmed in the Place de la Joliette and the Place
Victor Gélu, the rendezvous of seamen in Marseilles. As my acquaintance
with these “beachcombers” increased, I picked up knowledge of the
“grafts” of the port. On my fourth morning in the city I was aroused
from a nap against the pedestal of the bronze Gélu by a Brazilian
sailor, who had been long stranded in the city.
“Hóla! Yank,” he shouted, “are you coming for breakfas’?”
“Busted!” I answered, shortly.
“Con̄o, me too,” he returned; “come along.”
He led the way round the _vieux port_ and far out along the beach by a
steep road. In that section of Marseilles known as _les catalans_, once
the home of Dumas’ Monte Cristo, we joined a crowd before a granite
building above the entrance of which was a sign reading, “Bouchée de
Pain.” When the door opened we filed through an anteroom where a man
handed each of us a wedge of bread, _de deuxieme qualité_, from several
bushel baskets of similar wedges, and we passed silently on into an
adjoining room. The two rough tables it contained were each garnished
with a jar of water, which, as we ate our bread, passed from hand to
hand. On the walls hung copies of the rules governing the Bouchée de
Pain, and in various parts of the room stood officials who strove to
enforce them to the letter. The important ones were as follows:
* * * * *
“1. No talking is allowed in the Bouchée de Pain.
“2. The bread must be eaten at the tables and not carried away.
“3. Anyone bringing other food into the Bouchée de Pain to eat with his
bread will be summarily ejected.
“4. Bread will be served daily at ten and at three to those who do not
forfeit their right to the kind charity of the city of Marseilles by
disobeying these rules.”
* * * * *
But, as he who has come into contact with tramps and adventurers knows,
it is difficult to suppress the inventive talents of the genus
vagabundus by mere printed statutes, even with a cohort of officers to
enforce them. The second of the rules, especially, was not strictly
adhered to. The crowds that reported daily at the institution were so
great as to fill the tables a third and even a fourth time. The wily
ones about me, knowing that this was only the “first table,” nibbled
their wedges ever so slowly, until the uninitiated had finished their
portions and the officers cried “allez,” when they tucked what was left
under their coats, and tumbled with the rest of us through a back door,
there to trade the wedge for tobacco, or to eat it with what they had
picked up about the city.
“Vámonos, hombre,” said the Brazilian; “now for the soup.”
A full two miles we walked over another steep hill to find, before a
building styled “Cuillère de Soupe,” much the same crowd as had been at
the Bouchée de Pain. The soup was more carefully doled out than the
bread had been. An officer at the door called for our papers, set down
our names in his register, and handed us tickets which entitled us to
soup at eleven and four daily, but only for eight days.
The fates preserve me from ever again tasting the concoction, misnamed
soup, which was set before me when I had gained admittance. A bowl of
water, grey in color, and of the temperature which the doctor calls for
when he has by him neither a stomach-pump nor a feather with which to
tickle the patient’s throat, contained one leaf—and that the very
outside one—of a cabbage, half an inch of the top of a carrot with the
leaves still on it, and three sprigs of what looked like grass. When I
had made a complete inventory of my own dish, I turned to peer into that
of the Brazilian. He had the selfsame portion of a carrot, a companion
to my cabbage-leaf, and three quite similar blades of grass. Certainly,
one could not accuse the soup officials of partiality, and if the cook
was sparing of specimens from the vegetable kingdom he made up for it in
ingredients from the world of minerals. There was salt enough in my mess
to have preserved a side of beef, and pebbles of various sizes and
shapes chased each other merrily around behind the spoon with which I
stirred up the mixture. I know not who supplied the establishment with
water, but the beach was not far distant.
Several times I returned to the Bouchée de Pain before I left Marseilles
behind; the Cuillère de Soupe I struck off my calling list at once.
The city of Marseilles has established these two institutions in an
attempt to reduce the begging class, and to provide an alternative for
the indiscriminate asking of alms, which is strictly forbidden in the
city. The buildings have purposely been placed in the most inconvenient
sections of the municipality and far apart, in the hope that only those
who are in dire want will visit them. As small an amount of food is
given as will sustain life, because it is fancied that this arrangement
will cause the penniless to redouble their efforts to become
self-supporting. Yet the plan is not entirely a success, though the
authorities may not know it. Many a man I have seen at these places whom
I knew had money enough on his person to buy a dozen hotel dinners—money
wheedled out of soft-hearted and soft-headed tourists, which he would
have considered it a sin to pay out for food when cool, green absinthe
could be bought with it. The “dress-suit tramps,” if they had no “bigger
game on the string,” made this walk their daily exercise, and referred
to it as their “constitutional.” Those who wished really to look for
work found that the long tramp twice a day used up both their time and
their strength, until they had little of either left to prosecute their
search.
The strike broke and business was slowly and half-heartedly resumed. All
my efforts to find work, however, turned to naught. It became evident
that if ever I “shipped” for the Orient it must be through the
assistance of someone of better standing. A few of the “beachcombers”
signed on, but every captain who wandered through the Place Victor Gélu
to pick up a sailor was at once surrounded by a half-hundred seamen
headed by their “boarding masters,” and chose his man long before an
“outsider” could gain a hearing. In many a city of Europe I had been
advised by fellow-wayfarers to appeal to the American consul. In the
opinion of my English companion and others: “That’s all the bloody
loafers are shipped over here for, anyway, to give we honest chaps a
lift when we’re down.” Not quite sharing this view, I had, thus far,
thanked the advisers and gone my way. But when I had seen several
“beachcombers” sail away through the assistance of higher authorities, I
determined to make my existence known to our Marseilles representative.
Accordingly, on my return from the Bouchée de Pain one morning, I
stopped in at the consulate. My papers were inspected by a negro
secretary in the outer office, passed on to the vice-consul, and finally
to the consul-general. That official, calling me inside to satisfy
himself as to my nationality, gave me a note to one “Portuguese Joe,”
whom I would find “hanging around on the Place Victor Gélu.” Joe, the
consul explained, was master of a sailors’ boarding house, who undertook
to shelter and feed such penniless mariners as the consul could vouch
for, until he found them berths, and took his reward in a month’s
advance on their wages—the regular blood-money system that is in vogue
in almost every port.
I found Joe “hanging around” as the consul had promised, hanging around
a lamp-post in the center of the _place_, and if he had not been able to
find some such support he would have been lying around the same public
spot. He was a big, greasy, half-breed nigger—I should hate to say
negro—and he had what, in Jack Tar’s parlance, is known as “a full
cargo.” In a ring about him were a score of sailors of various
nationalities and colors, from plain New Yorkers and Baltimore negroes,
to East Indians and men from the Congo Free State, who were making the
boarding master the butt of their raillery. These same men, except,
perhaps, the Anglo-Saxons, would have quailed before this maudlin
rascal, sober, whom they were repaying, now, by their ridicule, for many
a perfidious trick he had played them.
I received a franc from the drunken lout as soon as I had made him
understand the note from the consul, and lost no time in leaving it in a
restaurant. That night I slept on the floor of Joe’s house, with a huge
Antigua negro as a roommate. The house was a shack bordering on the
fish-market and the red-light district, a quarter requiring six
policemen to the block. Several times during the night I started up at
some piercing scream or long-drawn wail, and I borrowed a morning paper
fully expecting to read of deeds of unusual violence. But it was only
the customary list of minor misfortunes that was chronicled; a carousing
sailor run down in that street, an Italian stabbed by a
fellow-countryman in this, a demi-mondaine thrown out of a window in a
third.
Portuguese Joe was a totally different being the next morning from the
besotted wretch that I had seen the day before. Fat and pompous, dressed
as if to attend a fancy ball, he paraded up and down the seamens’
rendezvous, interviewing a captain here, stopping for a tête-à-tête with
another boarding master or a runner there, and scowling haughtily at the
common sailors who ventured to approach him.
Joe was a fair example of the type that is the visitation of seamen
ashore. Jack Tar is the most prodigal of existing beings, either with
the earnings in his pocket or with those he has yet to toil for, and he
bears with far too much resignation the knavery of these shipping
masters. With all its romance, life on the ocean wave is a dreary and
precarious enough existence to the man before the mast, yet many are the
nations that enhance the misery of his lot by tolerating these human
sharks and their nefarious practices in their ports. When Jack comes
ashore, his one desire, in most cases, is to spend his accumulated
earnings as soon as possible. At sea, money is the most worthless of
commodities. The man in the forecastle on a long voyage would not sell
his share of the soggy “plum-duff” that comes with his Sunday dinner for
a month’s wages in cash. Small wonder, then, that he is lavish with his
pounds and shillings during his few days ashore, and that he rarely
thinks of shipping again until his last coin is spent. It is then that
the careless prodigal falls an easy prey to Portuguese Joe and his ilk.
Joe boasted of “never having done a tap of work” in his life. His
mixture of Portuguese and negro blood had made him a tolerably
quick-witted fellow, with considerable tact, as that quality goes among
seafaring men. He had picked up a practicable use of most of the
European languages, and enough knowledge of the niceties of French law
to know how far he could go with impunity in fleecing his victims. In
various ways he had ingratiated himself with captains and the agents of
ships sailing from Marseilles, until he had become one of several
absolute monarchs in that port over slow-witted, spendthrift Jack Tar.
Was business going badly? Then Joe was down aboard some ship talking his
way with his oily tongue into a seat at the captain’s table. Were
sailors in demand? Then he was picking them up everywhere, giving them a
meal or two, and shipping them off with nothing but a bag of ragged
“gear” to show for the month or six weeks’ advance on their wages, which
he hastened back to throw on the gambling table or to spend in the nasty
vices of a great seaport. To be sure, some of this money would have gone
the same way if the sailor had received it. But one could more easily
have tolerated its squandering by the man who had undergone the
sufferings and privations of a long voyage to earn it, and at least we
“beachcombers” should have been spared the sight of Portuguese Joe and
his cronies, strutting back and forth across the Place Victor Gélu, and
putting their heads together to evolve new schemes for robbing other
victims.
There were few accommodations in Joe’s hovel, and on the second day I
was transferred to a seamens’ boarding house in the dingy backwater of
the Avenue de la République. The establishment was run by Joe’s brother,
a burly mulatto known in all the lower quarters of the city as
“Portuguese Pete” who, like his brother, lay claim to no family name;
and by his wife, a slatternly white woman of French parentage. In the
windowless upper story were a score of foul nests that ranked as beds.
The one to which I was assigned was a broken-backed cot. After a vain
attempt to sleep, doubled up like a pocketknife, amid the uproar of my
roommates, who were snoring in several languages, I crept down stairs to
borrow a plank from the kitchen wood-pile, and propping up the pallet,
fell asleep. Some time must have passed, for I was in deep slumber and
not even the house cat was stirring, when the cot, mattress, bedding,
and prop came down with a crash that certainly awakened the policeman in
the next block, and left me entangled in a Gordian knot of sheets and
counterpanes of the width of a ship’s hawser. I slept on the floor
during the rest of my stay with Portuguese Pete.
There was one advantage—and one only—gained by the change from the Asile
to this new lodging. The habits of Pete and his spouse were by no means
as austere as those of the monks who turned us out into the cold, grey
dawn. The meals we were to pay so dearly for, when we shipped, were on a
par with the sleeping accommodations. Each morning, after taking turns
in pounding on the proprietor’s door for an hour or two, we usually
succeeded in inducing his consort to descend, in négligé and a vicious
temper, to serve us each a cup of tepid water with a smell of chickory
about it, and a wedge of bread. At noon and night we did duty
alternately before the black, smoky fire-place, in assisting Madame Pete
to prepare the soup and macaroni that were served in painfully meager
quantities with bread and brackish wine. Like the pupils of Squeers, we
dared not ask for more, lest we call down upon our heads the mighty
wrath of Pete.
Pete spoke a cosmopolitan language, an Esperanto of his own making,
concocted from all the tongues represented around his board, with no
partiality or predeliction for any particular one. He who did not know
at least French, English, Italian, and Portuguese or Spanish, with
something of the patois of Provence, had small chance of catching more
than the drift of Pete’s remarks. English words with Italian endings,
Portuguese words with a French pronunciation, French words that started
out well enough but ended with a nondescript grunt, all uttered in a
voice that made the rafters ring and the wine-glasses on the table dance
excitedly, were the daily accompaniments of our gatherings. Yet Pete,
with all his bellow, was the exact antithesis of his brother. He had
spent years before the mast and had been rated an excellent sailor,
before he drifted into Marseilles and became the understudy of
unscrupulous Joe. He was as slow of wit as the seamen who quailed before
his wife’s bleary eye—and as for tact! The only influence or coercion
which Pete could bring to bear on those of his fellow-men who did not
heed the roar of his mighty voice were his no less mighty fists. More
than once he had threatened, like the giant Antiguan, to use these
powerful arguments on his brother’s anatomy; for Joe had never
hesitated, when there was something to be gained by it, to entrap Pete
in the meshes of his Machiavelian plots. As when, during a season of
sharp demand for sailors, he had generously served Pete with “knock-out
drops,” dragged him on board a ship bound for the fever-infected,
west-African coast, and made merry with the two months’ advance offered
for any seaman that could be captured. But Joe let himself be caught
only in the glare of daylight and on the public squares, and there the
wrath of Pete and many another who had fought his way back to Marseilles
with the avowed intention of throttling the rascally half-breed, had
vanished at the sound of that oily tongue. Pete was kind-hearted and
prodigal by nature, and years in the forecastle had by no means cured
him of these faults. Those who knew told tales of his favors to boarders
and of the groaning of his table in the days of prosperity. But evil
times had fallen on Marseilles and, like my fellow-boarders, I always
left Pete’s hovel with a gnawing hunger, and divided my days between
following the clue of some job and wandering with envious eyes through
the market-places.
The band that rose from our table to follow Pete to the ship-chandler’s
office or to tramp at Joe’s heels, by night or by day, to the far end of
the breakwater, in pursuit of a rumor that a ship was “signing on,” was
as variegated in experience as in color. Two hulking, good-hearted
Baltimore negroes were the heroes of the party. In a strike riot of two
months before they had been arrested for killing a gendarme, a crime of
which they were really, though unintentionally, guilty. The prosecution,
however, had not succeeded in proving a case against them. The older had
been sentenced to sixty days and the younger, who had been shot during
the mélée, was left to recuperate in the city hospital. They burst in
upon us almost at the same time during my first days at Pete’s, and took
the head of the board at once. Two nights later the hospital patient—a
youth of nineteen—gave an exhibition of cool, collected grit that is
rarely equaled even among seafaring men. A half-dozen of us had stepped
into a cabaret in the unconventional section of the city. A quarrel
began over some question of racial dislike. In the free-for-all battle
that ensued an Italian drew a long, double-edged sheath knife and sprang
for the youth from Baltimore. The latter had scarcely finished knocking
down another assailant but, without stepping aside ever so little, he
calmly grasped the finely ground blade in his left hand, and while the
blood gushed down his forearm, as the Italian strove to twist the knife
out of his grip of iron, he drew from his hip-pocket a razor, opened it
behind his back as tranquilly as for a morning shave, and slashed his
opponent from ear to chin. With the Italian’s necktie bound tightly
around his wrist, he marched homeward, singing plantation ballads at the
top of his voice, washed his mutilated palm in a bucket, tied it up with
the tail of a shirt, and sallied forth in quest of new adventures.
As near-heroes, there was a stocky little Spaniard, once a
_banderillero_, who had abandoned the bull-ring for the forecastle with
a dozen scars from sharp horns on his neck and body. His tales were
rivaled by a Jamaican negro, the only survivor of a shipwrecked crew,
who had risen to power in a South-Sea island, and by an Australian who
was credited with having thirty-six wives. An Italian who had been on
the operatic stage—what for, we could not find out; a Finn who chewed
tobacco while he ate; and a runaway boy from Madeira, who flooded his
macaroni with tears so regularly that his portion was always served
unsalted, were likewise on exhibition. Then there was “Antoine de la
Ceinture” (Tony of the Belt). Tony was one of the last-but-not-least
sort. Were we bound for the chandler’s office? Then Tony could be
trusted to bring up the rear. Was dinner late in being served? It was
because Tony had not yet put in an appearance. Was Joe lining us up for
inspection before some skipper? Then everyone knew without looking that
it was Tony who answered to his name at the end of the line. But Tony’s
most remarkable feature was his belt. Many of the workmen of France wear
in lieu of suspenders, long, gaily-colored sashes. Yet no belt in the
length and breadth of France could rival Tony’s. It was as red as the
blood that flowed on the night of the mélée—when Tony had lived up to
his reputation by being the farthest from the center of action;—it was a
good yard wide and longer than the longest royal brace ever rove through
a block; and forty times each day Tony must unwind it from around his
waist, give an end to one of us, with a warning to keep it stretched to
its full width, and march off down the street with the other end. There
he would take the first turn around his body, pull the sash taut; and
with a flutter of coat-tails and arms, up the street would come Tony,
spinning round and round as if carried along by a whirlwind, until he
reached his temporary valet, when he would heave a sigh of regret
because the belt was not longer, or brighter, or wider, or didn’t make
him look enough like the spool on which a bolt of cloth is wound, or for
some other reason quite beyond our comprehension; and, tucking in the
end, would tag at the _queue_ of our company to some other section of
the city, there to unwind and wind himself up again.
[Illustration: My entrance into Paris in the corduroy garb and with the
usual amount of baggage of the first months of the trip]
[Illustration: “Tony of the Belt”]
Workers were a drug on the market in Marseilles. There was one happy day
when, in wandering about the _vieux port_, where the fleet of
“windjammers” was rolling and pitching in a heavy gale, I was promised
extraordinary wages by the captain of a clumsy barkentine, flying the
checkerboard Greek flag, to help his depleted crew move the craft to a
safer mooring. He had picked up the Antiguan and—strange to relate—Tony
of the Belt; and together we tugged at hawser and brace for several
hours, while the barkentine under our feet seemed undetermined after
each roll whether to right herself again or turn turtle. But we got her
re-moored at last, and the three francs which the skipper dropped into
my hand had a merry jingle which I had almost forgotten. A day’s work in
the fish-market won me as much more, and I seemed to have struck
prosperity when, the following morning, I spent three hours in rolling
wine-barrels onto harbor trucks. But the only reward which the truckman
and the official taster offered when the task was done was “all the wine
you can hold,” and my humble capacity forced me to accept much less than
union wages. The six-franc fortune dwindled gradually away, though I
spent it sparingly to supplement the meager fare of Pete’s table, or for
an occasional investment of two sous in tobacco. The French government
does not sell the weed in such small quantities. But “beachcombers”
hesitated to spend a half-franc all at once, especially as the
invariable word of greeting from seemingly countless acquaintances was,
“Any smokin’ on you, Jack?” and the dealers—indifferent to the law and
with an eye to business—broke up the legal ten-sous packets into ten
two-sous lots, in their own wrappings. There were fellow-boarders who
laughed at my extravagance. _They_ sallied forth in the morning before
the street-sweepers had made their daily round, and tramped up and down
the Cannebière, a main thoroughfare which evening promenaders littered
with cigar and cigarette butts. But the Anglo-Saxons, for the most part,
refused to employ their talents in “shooting snipes on the Can o’ Beer.”
The boarding-masters of Marseilles refused to believe my assertion that
I was bound away from, and not towards, my native land. Three times
during my stay with Pete, I was called upon to sign on—once on a collier
for Algiers, and twice on tramps bound for the “States.” My refusal to
accept these berths aroused the ire of Joe; and, on the day following
the sailing of the last craft, I was turned out dinnerless from Pete’s
domicile on a world that had grown decidedly cold for a southern
country. I could not greatly regret this ejection; it left Joe unable to
make a demand on my wages, should I ever sign on. My list of
acquaintances had increased; on some occasions I had spent a few sous to
relieve the hunger of some unhoused beachcomber, and the thoughtfulness
stood me now in good stead. As I wandered from Pete’s house down to the
Place de la Joliette, I fell upon one of these, a little, wizened
Alexandrian Jew, who had “just made a haul of a franc” which, with that
unselfishness universal “on the beach,” he offered at once to share.
That night I found myself again in the crowd before the Asile de Nuit.
Quarrels were frequent among the destitutes who collected at the asylum,
but not often was it the scene of such a tragedy as was enacted on this
frosty evening. Five minutes after I had joined the group before the
building, a begrimed and tattered youth strolled up to within a few feet
of me, glanced about him, pulled a revolver from his pocket, fired
instantly at a group of vagabonds who chatted on the curb ten feet away,
and dashed off towards the harbor. The victim, a German who could not
have been over twenty, fell with scarcely a groan, rolled off the
sidewalk into the gutter, gave a few convulsive kicks, and lay still. A
doctor arrived as he was being carried into the office. He had been shot
directly through the heart. My first impulse, when two gendarmes began
inscribing the names of witnesses, was to offer my testimony. Luckily,
it occurred to me in time that justice is a slow process in France, and
that authorities are none too kind in their methods of assuring the
presence in court of such witnesses as lodge at an Asile de Nuit. To be
delayed in Marseilles several months would have put an end to my
wanderings before they had well begun; I backed towards the outskirts of
the increasing crowd and made answer to the excited officer with the
book;—“Moi, monsieur? Je viens d’arriver.”
The assassin was taken, before morning, and his story added to the
annals of “the road.” The dead man had been his companion during his
Wanderjahre in Servia. The few dollars that had been their common
possession he had trusted to his comrade—no unusual custom among tramps.
At a dismal mountain village the treasurer had decamped, leaving the
other to the tender mercies of the Servian police. When he was released
from several weeks of imprisonment as a vagrant, the deserted man
determined to have revenge. By methods peculiar to trampdom, and with a
persistency that would have done credit to the best of detectives, he
had tracked the absconder through Montenegro, the Turkish coast-towns,
and Italy, only to lose all trace of him in Genoa. A chance meeting put
him on the trail again; he tramped to Marseilles and ran the German
youth to earth five months after his act of treachery. The sympathy of
the beachcombers was entirely with the assassin. In the moral code of
“the road” there are few crimes more iniquitous than that of the dead
man. But sympathy availed him nothing, for months afterward the youth
was guillotined in the Place Victor Gélu, that dreary square in which
Portuguese Joe and penniless seamen were accustomed to “hang around.”
When excitement had abated somewhat, the Asile was thrown open—not for
me, however. The second frère received my papers from his superior, as
on the first night, but squinted at me above his glasses.
“Lodged here before?” he demanded.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“Then I can’t admit you.”
“But I only stayed five of my eight days.”
“Ça ne fait rien! When you have been admitted once you can’t come back
again for six months. Allez-vous en!”
This mandate proved inexorable. When I attempted to argue the matter a
burly doorkeeper sent me spinning into the street. I wandered away
through the city and, towards midnight, turned down to the wharves. An
empty box car stood behind a warehouse. I crawled inside to find it
already occupied by three English sailors of former acquaintance. To
sleep was impossible, for it was bitter cold. After a couple of hours of
shivering on the icy floor of the car, we crept out and took to tramping
up and down the streets and byways—that most dismal experience, known
professionally as “carrying the banner”—until daybreak.
Long, hungry days passed, days in which I could scarcely withstand the
temptation to carry my kodak to the _mont de piété_ just off the
sailors’ square. Among the beachcombers there were daily some who gained
a few francs, by an odd job, by the sale of an extra garment, or by
“grafting,” pure and simple. When his hand closed on a bit of money, the
stranded fellow may have been weak with fasting. Yet his first thought
was not to gorge himself, but to share his fortune with his companions
under hatches. In those bleak November days, many a man, ranked a
“worthless outcast” by his more fortunate fellow-beings, toiled all day
at the coal-wharves of Marseilles, and tramped back, cold and hungry, to
the Place Victor Gélu to divide his earning with other famished
_misérables_, whom he had not known a week before. More than one man
sold the only shirt he owned to feed a new arrival who was an absolute
stranger to all. These men won no praise for their benefactions. They
expected none, and would have opened their eyes in wonder if they had
been told that their actions were worthy of praise. The stranded band
grew to be a corporate body. By a job here and there I contributed my
share to the common fund, and between us we fought off gaunt starvation.
In a dirty alley just off the Place was an inn kept by a Greek, in which
one could sleep on the floor at three sous, or in a cot at six; and
every evening a band of ragged mortals might have been seen dividing the
earnings of some of them into three-sou lots as they made their way
towards _l’Auberge chez le Grec_.
One spot in all Marseilles was the sole oasis in this desert of
dreariness and desolation, the Sailors’ Home. Here, as winter drove us
away from the sunny side of the breakwater, where we had been able to
swim in early November, we congregated around the roaring stove to
discuss the hopelessness of the situation, and to peruse the newspapers
that kept us somewhat in touch with the moving world outside. But when
dusk fell, the doors were closed behind us, and the biting air and the
squalor of other quarters were only increased by contrast. I turned in
at the Home one morning, to find that misfortune had overtaken the three
Englishmen of the box car. My first acquaintance had arrived in
Marseilles in the thinnest of overalls and jumper. Man can endure far
more than most of us suspect; but night after night out of doors in such
garb had broken the health of the Englishman, and the gendarme who had
found him unconscious on the wharf had bundled him off to the Home. Sick
as he was, it took four days of official red-tape and nonsense to get
him admitted to the hospital, and it was only by strenuous efforts that
we were able to pay his bad _chez le Grec_ while the question was
pending. His two companions had deserted from the British navy in Buenos
Ayres, changed in name and dress, and signed on a “windjammer” for
Genoa. To escape the king’s service had cost them months of labor and
danger, a year’s wages, and their possessions. Nothing will better
indicate the misery of Marseilles on strike than the fact that, with six
months’ imprisonment at Gibraltar and a re-serving of their time in
prospect, they had resolved to endure “the beach” no longer, and had
marched up to the consul’s office to give themselves up. They were held
under arrest at the Home for the first British steamer for the Rock.
There were those among the beachcombers who would not be outdone by the
force of circumstances, who put on a bold front and set out to get the
“living the world owed them.” In beggardom as in the world at large, the
brazenface carries the day, and the modest and unassuming are pushed
into the background. Among the first victims of this class, in foreign
ports, are the consuls. There was in Marseilles a certain Welshman who
won fame for his exploits during this season. Signed off in Barcelona,
he had made his way to the French port, and had received from the
British consul, within an hour of his arrival, two francs and a promise
of clothes, next day. In the morning, as per promise, he was well fitted
out and given another franc. He promptly hunted up a pawn shop, got back
into his rags, and made tracks for the nearest wine-shop. Next morning,
penniless, he was back early to see the consul, spun a pathetic yarn,
and came out with two more francs. This amount, however, could not last
long in a café. The Welshman pocketed the money, marched over to the
American consulate, and proved so satisfactorily that Pittsburg was his
home that two more francs were added to his collection. Day after day
new variations of his story were sprung in all sections of the city. On
his ability to speak some German, he “worked” the Austrian, Swiss, and
German consuls, besides several foreign charitable societies. These
institutions gave only clothing for the most part, but one of the
Welshman’s experience had little difficulty in turning them into money.
Meanwhile, he was “pumping” his own consul, who twice more fitted him
out, only to have him turn up again next morning as ragged and unkempt
as ever. The consul was not blind, but when a vagabond sits down in your
office and refuses to move until he receives a franc, it is often
cheaper to give it than to take time to throw him out. The day came,
however, when the consul determined to put an end to this system of
blackmail, and, after giving the customary franc one morning, he ordered
the Welshman not to come back again under pain of arrest. Bright and
early the next morning the “beachcomber” turned up, a strong smell of
absinthe entering the room with him.
“Good morning, consul,” he burst out, gaily, and loud enough to be heard
by those of us who were listening outside, “I wonder if you can spare me
a couple of francs for a morning bite?”
The consul stepped to the telephone and called for a policeman. A few
minutes later, a gendarme pushed past us, stepped inside, and received
orders to put the offender under arrest. But the Welshman, who lolled
undisturbed in an office chair through all this, had taken the trouble
to make himself familiar with the fine points of international law. He
grasped a heavy ruler from the table as the officer approached.
“If that Frog-eater touches me, I’ll brain ’im,” he shouted, “I’m a
British subject on British soil, and no bloody Frenchman can arrest me!”
The consul knew only too well the truth of this assertion. A French
officer has no more authority within the borders of a foreign consulate
than on London Bridge, and any injury which the Welshman might do the
gendarme in resisting arrest would come under the head of justifiable
self-defense. The consul, however, had police powers in his own office.
He took the belligerent seaman by the arm, led him outside onto the soil
of France, and turned him over to the policeman. The officer conducted
him to the station-house across the way, while several of us tagged
after him.
“Where was he arrested?” demanded the sergeant.
“In the British consulate, monsieur.”
“Vraiment! And the British consul has sent money for his keeping while
he is shut up, eh?”
“Non, monsieur.”
“Non? Then what do you mean by bringing him over here? Allez! Vous!” and
the Welshman, who knew all this process, move by move, made a deep bow
to the sergeant, stuck his thumbs in the armholes of his tattered vest,
strutted out across the park, and back into the consulate.
“Good morning, consul!” he cried, with the blandest of smiles, and
extending a gnarled and far from clean hand. “I’ve just escaped from
grave danger, consul, and I’ve come back to see if, perhaps, you haven’t
changed your mind about that couple of francs.”
The consul looked him over, glanced at the stack of letters and official
papers that demanded his attention, and, with the sheepish look of a man
who feels he is being made game of, admitted that he had.
There ran through the shipping quarters one morning the rumor that the
“Dag” was signing on a crew. She was a tiny wooden brigantine under
Norwegian colors, anchored in the vieux port. She carried a mere handful
of men, was reported as “the hungriest hell that ever weighed an
anchor,” and did not look seaworthy enough to cross an inland lake.
Moreover she was bound for Madagascar by way of the Cape of Good Hope, a
six-month trip at least. This was not the route I had mapped out for
myself. But it was eastward, twenty-five days in Marseilles had left me
ready to jump at any chance, and I raced down to the old harbor with the
rest. It was only a chance meeting with “Dutch Harry,” another of the
rascally boarding masters of the port, that saved me from putting my
name on the “Dag’s” articles. “Dutch” had a contract with the agents of
a tramp steamer from Boston to supply a force of seamen to paint the
vessel in harbor; and an hour later I was hanging over the side on a
swinging plank with the waves of the râde washing over my feet, daubing
paint on the rusty hull. The boarding master received six francs a day
for our labor—and paid us two and a half. But we took our meals with the
crew—whenever the captain was ashore—and I saved enough to come to the
assistance of several of my fellow destitutes, among whom was the
wizened Jew, who had once more fallen on evil days.
This work lasted several days. I was mixing paint on deck, one
afternoon, when the chief mate, strolled by, sauntered back, turned to
look away across the harbor as though he had not seen me within five
feet of him, and muttered as to himself, “We’re going out to-night,
homeward bound for Boston. The company don’t allow us any too many men.
If some of these painters was found stowed away on ’er after the pilot
left ’er, I don’t suppose the old man would do a hell of a lot o’
kicking.” Then he turned until he could glance at me out of the tail of
his eye, looked off across the harbor once more, swung round on his
heel, and marched aft.
If the ship had been eastward bound, the mate’s hint would have fallen
on fertile soil. Several painters disappeared during the afternoon and
they did not go ashore. I took supper with the crew when the day was
done, watched from the pier-head as the newly-painted vessel turned her
prow to the open sea, and hurried back to the dwelling of the boarding
master. “Dutch” was indeed wrathy—especially as I had called for two and
a half francs that he had considered safe in his pocket. When I opened
the door of his wine-shop, he stared at me from behind a dense cloud of
smoke and a tall bottle of greenish contents for several moments. Then
with a roar that only Portuguese Pete of all Marseilles could have
equaled, he burst out, “Why, you damn fool, why in hell didn’t you stow
away on that tub? Didn’t you know she was Boston bound?”
“Aye,” I answered. “But I told you, you remember, I’m not homeward
bound.”
Several ships bound for Egypt signed on a man or two during the next few
days, but they were all “boarding-house stiffs.” When the mate of the P
& O yacht _Vectis_ sent to the Home for an English quartermaster, I
fancied my time had come, as there was not another English-speaking
sailor “on the beach” after the arrest of the deserters. But the P & O
ships only Britons. The next day my first acquaintance was released from
the hospital and secured the berth.
The last day of November, a month after my arrival in Marseilles, found
me still gazing out upon the Château d’If and up at the ship’s ball on
the summit of Notre Dame de la Garde, and still tramping sorrowfully up
and down the breakwater and the endless wharves. But with the new month
my luck changed. The _Warwickshire_ of the Bibby Line, plying between
England and Burma, put in at Marseilles to await her overland passengers
and sent out a call for a sailor. I was the first man on board,
displayed my discharge from the cattle boat, and was called into the
cabin.
“It don’t tell in this discharge whether you are an A. B. or not,” said
the mate. “Are you?”
“I am an A. B.,” I replied, though I meant quite a different sort of A.
B. from what the mate understood by my answer. I was signed on at once,
and the next day I watched the familiar harbor of Marseilles grow
smaller and smaller until it faded away on the horizon.